A White Dude in Bali

Best Travel Locations for White Dudes

It’s good to be a white dude in Bali.

Upon first arrival at the airport, about 15 people were trying to give me a ride to my hotel. I resisted multiple times but eventually gave in to the most persistent guy.

I recommend against this because he ended up overcharging me. If you have enough money to not care, just accept that you’re going to spend way more than you would with their version of Uber. You will have to be very firm and direct because there might be a guy who’s not particularly willing to take no for an answer.

But! He offered me his girls as he drove me to my hotel. The guy’s English was good enough, but he communicated having sex by making undignified throat noises and shit. I hadn’t even put away my luggage yet.

By the time the taxi driver dropped me off, I was pretty annoyed, so I just went along with the price he gave me, which amounted to a more expensive Uber ride by US standards. Turns out I left my credit card in the ATM in the midst of the stress of trying to figure out how the ATM worked to pay the taxi driver. But then, some man tracked me down on the sidewalk with my credit card in hand — effectively restoring my faith in the Balinese.

My first evening, I wandered my street and randomly chose a bar to check out. There was an eclectic mix of expats and locals, and the conversation turned out to be rather delightful, first featuring a flamboyant Indonesian man who was tempered by actual men from Australia and Britain, and the Indonesian women acting as a sort of middle ground between the two. I quite liked that I was the only guy in his twenties, and the only American.

I went across the street to inquire about some clove cigarettes. I don’t smoke, but at the time was lowk autistically interested in the incredibly cheap and varied selection of cigarettes offered in Bali. Most everyone smoked there, which I found to be charming at the time, cus they also had those really skinny cigarettes. As the aesthete I am, I quite liked seeing all these skinny chicks smoking skinny cigarettes, including the one I ended up fucking; more on that later.) Anyways, smoking kills and I only lightly smoked a couple for the novelty factor. This is a safe space for pretending to smoke clove cigarettes.

Bali has a healthy relationship to transactionality. In the U.S., at least in my faggy neck of the woods, people are retarded about transactionality, but in Bali, it’s spelled out. No one is getting their feelings hurt about it like a hormonal 14-yr-old girl.

Wokeism isn’t a thing there. This one caught me off guard at first, but it’s arguably what makes the place so great. The bar I mentioned, which I returned to most nights during my stay, had a Substack type of vibe — racist white men in or nearing middle age, openly objectifying the island’s abundance of beautiful women and cheap amenities, while the locals objectified the westerners’ money and appetites. All the gals at the bar are trying to get the white dudes drunk off as many daiquiris as possible, and will lowk get offended if you try to tip them cus they know on some instinctual level that tipping is not what God intended (more rumination on tipping later).

For context, I came here after a month in Australia, which I quite liked, as the woke mind virus has not quite metastasized there. So I was already buttered up and enjoying my newfound freedom to make homophobic jokes and enjoy some well deserved misogyny. I somewhat accidentally tripped really hard on acid (having had zero prior psychedelic experiences) at some night club in Melbourne a few nights before flying out to Bali, so my mind was extra open. Perhaps that’s part of why I still ruminate on this trip about once per week.

On the second night, one of the older woman workers told me that she has a lot of hot young girls in the back. The people at the table informed me that this is called “The Aquarium” — a room with large glass walls and a bunch of whores, who you can select and take back and have sex with in one of the rooms. I was intrigued.

I still had some lingering libtard feelings about the proposition, but I said yes and went back. I have to say, I was quite surprised with the selection — petite, thick, tall, short, and always Asian. They select your girl of choice by shining a laser at her until she notices.

Some local guys looking at the girls asked me if I “liked them small.” I do like them small, in fact, so I chose a petite 5’ girl. Now, though, I wish I had chosen the only girl who was making eye contact with me. She was also petite, just taller. Perhaps that sex would’ve been more passionate.

The rooms had that vaguely decayed feeling from the humidity, but were otherwise perfectly clean, containing a queen-size-bed, clean sheets, a couple bath towels, a condom, and a bathtub with a hose. There were bright overhead lights, creating a curiously clinical feeling. The prostitute I chose decided to play kpop songs on her phone the whole time.

I was still experiencing the after-effects of years of taking the blue pill, which did color the entire experience. Like for example when I confirmed her age like a good boy, instead of trusting the system and getting to it. (I must disclose that I was not in fact a virgin, but was really fucking repressed, and kept trying to solve that with more blue pills.)

It’s important to note that essentially no one there gives a shit about how much sex you’ve had — being a tall white dude seems to speak for itself. They recognize that men universally want to have sex with young women, and use this fact to make money, as a service in a pretty saturated market. A local woman told me almost verbatim that the girls are just kind of lazy and don’t do much with their lives, so there is really no need to be whining about empowerment while simultaneously touting that sex work is work, as the girlies love to do in my hometown of Portland.

I even opened up to some of the local women about my conflicting feelings on the matter, mostly just saying that I generally felt bad about the situation. Even in the moment I recognized my concern as somewhat performative. I was trying to signal moral correctness, out of a fear that my pals at the bar would see me in a negative light. In retrospect, this was completely irrational, and all the women I talked to seemed pretty blasé about my concerns, but would offer me some assurance, saying things like, “It’s okay...it’s not even bad.” In fact, one of those very women encouraged me to go to the Aquarium beforehand, saying “you can just go and smash (clapping her hands aggressively to convey having sex) and then come back and have another Long Island iced tea.

The sex wasn’t even that great. Turns out positions are more limited when a foot of height difference is involved, but the nice thing is that no one is going to care how the sex was. Neither you nor the whore know each other or speak the same language, so there’s a strong sense of anonymity. That can help you make the experience more solipsistic, or whatever mindset you need to actually get into it.

Anyway, it was so cheap you could just try someone else the next night. This, I unfortunately did not do, but I intend to return. I’m sharing this partially as a personal impetus to actually make it happen. There’s also a bunch of foreigners there as well as locals who aren’t necessarily whores, so there’s plenty of different opportunities to practice actually seducing a girl.

But it wasn’t just the sex that made me want to return — I also found a unique ease of connection. I ended up going out to breakfast, to the beach and invited to someone’s abode for dinner, all from the people I met at the bar. The conversations at the bar were also a highlight for me — an older British guy who I talked to about the aquarium, and he offered me assurance by mentioning the people he supposedly killed in war as a pilot, and still sees himself as a good person. Another Brit, this one sharing my name, sparked up a conversation that frustrated me at the moment, but since then I find myself thinking about it fairly regularly. He was basically trying to get me to question my epistemic frame, starting by asking if I knew what chem trails were, then when I would speculate, he would say, “so you don’t know,” which is actually a conversational technique I still find to be obnoxious, but it basically led to him asserting that he only believes things that he could observe for himself. I still think he was partially fucking with me, but what was so electrifying was having actual different opinions and a comfort with moral ambiguity. A restaurant owner near my hotel offered me work, help finding an apartment, and said she had some connections and could take me on a cruise around the Islands. I wish I’d stayed for longer. But I didn’t.

I was feeling rejuvenated when I arrived back home to Portland, and decided to go out to a pretentious goth club to see if the DJ was any good and try my newfound skills at meeting people in bars. I happened to be paying in cash, and forgot to tip the bartender. She was being nice, saying things like “appreciate you” until the third drink, when she said “you haven’t been tipping all night.” I informed her that I had been traveling and simply forgot, and she responded, “well you’re in America now. Not everyone can afford to travel.” She also gave me the classic “If you can’t afford to tip, don’t go out,” which I told her was stupid. It was the first time I recall hearing that line, and just clocking the inherent retardation of needing to give money to someone in order to not be socially ostracized. She told me to go away or she would kick me out, and I told the person in line behind me to be sure to tip her because she was being a cunt. I don’t think the bartender heard me because she didn’t do anything.

She did end up kicking me out, after seeing me taking a sip of someone else’s drink (which was offered to me), along with a hetero soy couple, because they’d let me hit their vape. At least I didn’t get berated “for not clapping loudly enough” as one 1-star review of the place says.

None of this bullshit would ever happen in Bali. Almost everyone in the bar I went to was vaping and smoking like it was the 50s, with zero edgy pretensions attached to it. More broadly, this American way of conducting business through guilt and fear of social exclusion would not be seen as an acceptable way to maximize profits from your patrons. In Bali, tipping is generally seen as gauche. I actually tried to tip the whore the next day due to the blue pill still in my system, and the older woman (effectively one of the madams) who originally brought me back said I could tip, but I told her how much and she was like “no that’s way too much,” so I gave the whore a more acceptable, smaller, tip, and the older woman in that moment asked if I wanted the whore’s number (I took it but she never texted me back lol). The madam told me that the tip could count towards another girl that night. I said no thanks. This makes me cringe now.

The Portland bartender and Balinese prostitutes are both transactional, but the Portland model is societally corrosive because it moralizes it and relies on petty social shaming. If the Portland bartender knew about my time with the Balinese prostitute, she would likely say something like: “It’s valid for a woman to sell her body. Sex work is work. But you should not want to have sex with her. That’s taking advantage of poor people. You should tip heavily and then leave with blue balls.” Portland is not good for the white man. I want to pay $40 to fuck a hot Indonesian girl for an hour and eat a bunch of fresh fruit. I need to move to Bali.